Kanagen

Your favorite weird queer auntie Writer of (often lewd) speculative fiction 40f | lesbian | gender is a fuck (she/her) 18+ only y'all (it's pronounced ka-na-ngen) patreon.com/kanagen

[kanagenwrites]

Hey folks. My name is Kanagen (It's pronounced Ka-na-ngen. Kana is fine.), and I'm a writer. I mostly write sci-fi with a more or less sapphic bent, and I'm not shy about putting lewd content in what I write because fuck petty moralism.

I'm active in the Human Domestication Guide writing community, where apart from being an author (see below), I'm also a Loret, which means I help maintain and update the lore of the setting, help new creators with questions about it or how to fit a story into it, and so on. All of my publicly available fiction at the moment is HDG content, but I plan on working more on my own original settings and concepts in the future.

I have a Patreon, where I post my current long-form project's drafts chapter by chapter, once weekly. I also occasionally talk about my writing process. I'm hoping to expand content there in the future as well.

I don't use social media very much because I remember what the internet used to be like before walled gardens and techbros ruined it. (You kids really don't know what you're missing.) Nevertheless, the life of a freelance writer rather demands I put myself out there somehow, so here I am. You can also follow me on Bluesky, if you want. Ask me questions, behold the weird stuff I reblog, and try not to get too parasocial with me. I'm just a weird lady who puts words in funny shapes.

Bibliography

Long-Form Fiction

To Dine on Dust (ongoing) - A detective walks the streets of a weird, Jazz-Age Neo-Assyrian Empire that never was, trying to track down a missing goddess. A noir mystery-thriller with ancient Mesopotamian flavor, the coruscating power of divinities and the dead, and of course lesbians. Lots and lots of lesbians. This is one of my stories, after all. This is my current project, and unlike my HDG work, I won't be liveposting it publicly every week; if you want to know more about it, check out my Patreon.

Human Domestication Guide

Long-Form Fiction

No Gods, No Masters - A revolutionary leftist copes with the subtle differences between her own idea of the perfect world and the just-a-little-off version of it the Affini offer. First novel-length work in the Tillandsia Trilogy; highly suggested you read this before The Floret in the Mirror and especially Freedom's Ember.

The Floret in the Mirror - A mystery/thriller about identity, digitization, and impossible simulated lewdness. Content warning for amnesia resulting from traumatic brain injury as part of the setup. Sequel to* No Gods, No Masters*.

Freedom's Ember - Sixty years after the Affini conquered her world, a woman clings to her independence; sixty years after being frozen for cryogenic flight from the Affini, a woman struggles to discover who she really is when freed from her father's influence. What is freedom, and what does it mean in the context of the Compact? Sequel to No Gods, No Masters and The Floret in the Mirror, conclusion of the Tillandsia Trilogy.

Sui Generis - A martian attorney living on Earth finds adjusting to life with the Affini easier than most; she was already keeping her wife as a pet before they arrived. The real question is, where's that strange jealousy coming from?

Short Fiction

Mainspring - A Terran secret agent is captured by the Affini, trapped by artist for whom his body is a canvas, and she means to make of him her magnum opus. Wind-up doll content, and probably my most commonly cited story for "this rewired my brain"-style reactions.

Reading the Leaves - A tea-obsessed barista, an affini new to humanity, and a sweet (if awkward) romance culminating in a very raunchy ending. Entry for the HDG February Fluff Fic Jam 2024.

The Fifth Fundamental Force - This story is a silly joke. It should not be taken seriously, though many inevitably do.

Aftertaste (stalled) - A former quadrillionaire and epicure who just barely avoided domestication is tracked down by an affini culinary anthropologist who wants to use his brain to reconstruct a lost flavor using his long-buried memory - he was the last human to ever taste bluefin tuna. This fic is only sporadically updated because the stars must precisely align for my brain to be in a state to write boyliker fic. Sorry, I'm just really gay, y'all.

[sapphicsounds1312]

As someone who discovered she was disabled as an adult, and suddenly understood why so many things that come naturally to her peers she could barely manage at all (and at personal cost usually), who haa seen herself and been seen by others as abled, all while struggling with disabilies she didn't even know she had, who has historically been a bit more willful than friends who she often needed to stick up for, who has struggled with allowing herself to be vulnerable, and frequently finds herself shouldering other's burdens, I find the idea of affini florets very compelling and comforting.

Nobody slips through the cracks, everybody gets the love and care they need, even when at first glance they seem to be very capable and held together. And there's no shame in it, just an understanding that the burdens you were expected to bear are too much for you.

There's also something very compelling about people who are meant to be your peers seeing that, despite how things seem at first glance, you actually aren't like them, you can't keep up with them, and they see past the facade of "I can do anything you can" and recognize that you can't, actually. That the things which come so naturally to them are hurting you, and even though it looks like you're keeping up, one peak behind the curtan reveals just how much you're struggling, and that's okay. You don't have to be this way if it's hurting you.

I find immense comfort in the idea of being told "hey it's okay, you don't have to be like us, you don't have to struggle to keep up just because it seems like you should be able to. You don't have to be one of us, and we won't jusge you for it."

When I create HDG I am writing a world where just like some humans aren't cut out to be human, some adults aren't cut out to be adults, some people aren't cut out to be people, so too are some affini not cut out to be affini. And they are worthy of all the love in the universe, just as every other floret is.

[sapphicsounds1312]

Oh and I guess also it's blisteringly hot to go from a position at the apex of the social hierarchy you inhabit down to a cherished little possession. Both giving that position up willingly, knowing full well what that means, and having it unwilling extracted from you as you insist you don't need it, while all the other affini (other affini, as if you could ever have truly been called one) see you for what you really are.

That's uh, that's maybe part of it. Gosh it gets really tiring having to type with one hand.

[elierlick]

Yet another new study debunked the basis for the anti-trans sports bans. It was never about sports but for creating legal avenues for exclusion and abjection. This is one of the largest analyses ever conducted, involving 52 studies and 6,485 trans people. Read the study here.

[lucieslucidity]

post so nice had to reblog it twice and force it down everyone's throats

[fleshengine]

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

We gotta fix that.

[foone]

Important rules for the "age verification" era of the internet that we're living in:

1. Do not do age verification.

2. If you have to do age verification, cheat. Do not under any circumstances give them your real ID.

[very-gay-alkyrion]

Free Tool Says it Can Bypass Discord's Age Verification Check With a 3D Model

The tool presents users with a 3D model they can then manipulate to, the creator says, bypass Discord's age verification system.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

And remember to not make a second account just to test out what works best when verifying your identity

[asksanguinius40k]

A reminder that we still dont support Age Verification bullshit.

[flower-crowns-and-combat-boots]

Paywall removed here

[hungrymilliek]

Aaand here's the link to the project's Github.

GitHub - promptpirate-x/discord-id-bypass-tool: A verified tool that works on any potato computer that will let you bypass discord verificat

A verified tool that works on any potato computer that will let you bypass discord verification - promptpirate-x/discord-id-bypass-tool

[kushblazer666]

nothing pisses me off more than a proud “no msg!” label on something. shut up you dumb bitch put the msg back in there so it tastes good. idiot

[sapphicsounds1312]

REAL.

It isn't quite common yet but I have been noticing some newer restaurants reclaiming MSG as what it is (pure flavor crystals).

Also iirc (might be wrong tho I don't have a source) part of the moral panic around MSG was suburban white people attributing a feeling of "mouth numbness" that they did not like to chinese restaurants usiing MSG. That's just szechuan peppercorn. You were eating szechuan peppercorn.

[kanagenwrites]

Fun fact that I've learned as a result of having to watch my sodium intake (it'll happen to you too, kids), MSG actually has less sodium per given amount of the stuff than actual salt does. Weird, huh?

But think about it. Salt: Sodium Chloride. NaCl. One part sodium (Na), one part chlorine ion(Cl⁻). That chlorine ion has a molar mass of 35.45 g·mol⁻¹.

Now, MSG: Monosodium Glutamate. C₅H₈NO₄Na. That huge mess of letters and numbers in the front is our glutamate, and that monster has a molar mass of 147.130 g·mol⁻¹. That's four times the mass of the chlorine ion in sodium chloride! And, since both sodium chloride and monosodium glutamate have one sodium atom per, we can clearly see that any given molecule of MSG is going to dwarf, in mass terms, the salt molecule.

Now, MSG is not a 1:1 replacement for salt; it has a much more savory taste than salty (the chloride is what gives salt its sharp salty kick, which is why potassium chloride works as a salt replacement if you don't mind an often-overwhelming metallic flavor; the glutamate is what gives MSG the savory taste). In real terms, what this chemistry comes down to is that a teaspoon of Diamond kosher salt has 1120mg of sodium and a teaspoon of the MSG I have (that I've long since thrown away the box I got it in) has 800mg of sodium (the MSG is a lot finer; if I ground down the kosher salt, that teaspoon would have a LOT more sodium in it). I know these numbers because they're the ones I use for tracking my sodium intake when I season things, so you can see how much less the MSG adds (especially since you really don't need a lot of MSG to add its particular flavor to a recipe, it's very potent).

Anyway, there's a little chemistry infodump for you.

[choko-predap-first-bloom]

Hello darlings. I've been too ill to do any writing for a while now, but I do have this scrapped fic I can share in the hopes that one of you might enjoy it. It's based on an old joke from my broader fanfiction blog that was along the lines of "Indie goes to the airport and every other seat of their flight is taken by an Affini; hijinks ensue." Why was it scrapped? Well, turning a one-off joke into a 4000 word work can have the side effect of making you realize toward the end that perhaps this idea isn't very good. Still, I think some of you might enjoy what's written, so I have provided a link ^^ Flight Anxiety If any of you would like to rescue this one by co-writing it's conclusion, send over a DM and I can provide the notes for how the rest of the story was going to play out. For the rest of you, please enjoy ^^

[sapphicsounds1312]

I love our community

I don't often talk about this but I do truly love our community. The HDG community is so full of wonderfully creative and welcoming people. People who are always eager to help and collaborate. People who are always so excited about one another's ideas and creations. This community has introduced me to some of my best friends, to the love of my life, helped me discover so many new and important things about myself. It's changed so much over the years, having gone from a handful of people on a tiny private server to a community of thousands. And I'm really proud to have been one of the people that helped build it.

It hasn't always been smooth sailing. At times, there's been drama, arguments, hurt feelings. I've had my share of night crying over something someone said to me, or feeling like my feelings had gone disregarded, unheard, or like a crucial part of the community that I love had been lost, or changed beyond recognition. I've gained and lost valued friends. People I truly care about, love and respect have both as individuals and as creators have walked away from the community. Sometimes simply because they outgrew it, other times because of hurt. I've spent more hours than I can count mediating disagreements, trying to mend bridges, some of them fixable, others not so much.

But even through the worst of it, I love this community, I love the shared work that so many people have helped create. I love the promise of HDG, a living, breathing creative space built in collaboration with what is now hundreds of creators. Some, like myself have been creating for about as long as HDG has been a shared setting. Others are brand new. Nothing excites me more than seeing someone new come in and blow people away with a fresh take on the setting. Nothing excites me more than seeing my friends, and fellow respected creators gush over a new work (especially if it's one of mine :)). To me, HDG feels like it's in a renaissance. New ideas flourishing, new authors creating.

And despite the bumps in the road, despite the good old days I often miss so dearly, I'm so glad to have seen this community grow, and to still be a part of it. Because it feels stronger, more friendly, and more welcoming than ever. And that's because of people like you, creating in it, reading it, sharing your love and appreciation for the creators. So thank you for helping make the community I love so great.

[lagnya]

I love hdg.

I really love hdg. I really love the axioms, and the versatile flexibility the narratives provide, as well as the unique challenges 'living in paradise' entails when the benevolent dorks that saved you are amazing and wonderful, but each have their own little flaws.

I really love the choice being taken from you, I love the care, the tender touch of vines on skin, I love the freedom that comes with entering its pages or penning them yourself.

What I love even more is the sophonts you get to work with when you make it. You can do so many cool things, like connecting different pieces of a lego set or building something with your friend. It feels like that wonder from so long ago that the simple act of creating felt good, unburdened by the pressures of anything else.

It's a sandbox, right? It's okay if your castle looks a little weird, mine fell over a few times.

I get sad when people leave the sandbox, but it's okay of course. The sand's kinda rough and sticky and that's not good sensory for everyone.

I really like making it, and genuinely if you've ever had an interest in the plampts I reccomend you take a peek at some works, and maybe write your own. I think something really special about the setting is how encouragement and love are its crowning jewels. There's no entry level position required, you can start from anywhere and build your own castle.

I really love hdg.

[littleembla]

Some Affini adopt many florets!

[existennialmemes]

The crux of the anti trans movement is a war on bodily autonomy. They don't want you to have any agency over what you look like, how you dress, who you date, whether to have kids, etc.

They want total control over you. Not just trans people. Not just queer people. You. Everyone.

Trans people are just a scapegoat. They want total control over everyone's self expression. They want the right to mold you into their perfect little cog in their dehumanizing machine.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Our rights are your rights. Our destruction is your destruction.

[our-trans-punk-experience]

10/10 post bringing it back for 2026

[kanagenwrites]

Do you have a favorite novel or other written work? In a lot of your stories there are quotes from a myriad of authors, making me wonder which you might recommend reading. ❤️

Uh oh. Now you've done it. :)

It should surprise no one, given (as you say) my habit of referencing other works of literature, philosophy, etc in my work, that I have been and still tend to be (when life is not kicking me directly in the front teeth, anyway) a voracious reader. As such, I would not say that I have a favorite novel, but rather that I have many. Most of them, I've reread time and again, because I like to go back and re-experience stories with the new perspective that another year or so of life has given me.

Long-winded ramble under the cut for the sake of everyone else's dashboard. ;)

Rather than try to put things in any particular order, I'm just going to write these down as I wander past my bookshelves and go "ah, yes, that goes on the list."

One of my primary influences as a writer of science fiction is Alastair Reynolds, who I first discovered through his novel Revelation Space and the setting built up around it. Space opera has always been a jam for me, but the relatively hard science and the lack of any FTL added a dimension to it that caught my attention immediately. Lighthuggers, the signature starship of the setting, live rent-free in my brain and are gender as fuuuuuck for me, especially the good ship Nostalgia For Infinity. Reynolds has written a ton of non Rev-Space books too, like the Poseidon's Children series and what might be my favorite of all his books, House of Suns, because the deep-time shenanigans of the shatterling lines set my brain on fire in the best way imaginable.

I could talk for hours about Octavia Butler, but I'll save you the trouble and just say "read absolutely anything Octavia Butler wrote." If i had to pick just one, I'd cheat and pick both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, because it's fucking spooky how she absolutely called the last 25 years of America's decline. If you're here because of HDG (and let's be real, you very probably are), you've likely heard about Bloodchild, which was one of GlitchyRobo's primary inspirations, and Lilith's Brood, which is basically tackling the same subject matter as HDG, just, y'know, not being as horny about it as we are.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is another perennial favorite of mine. He's not everyone's cup of tea; he tends to write big, sprawling stories that have dozens of characters, but he does that because he's examining systems as much as he's examining relationships between characters and how those systems affect them and their ideologies. Red Mars is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of that style set against the colonization of Mars and the massive rift it sparks not only between colonists in favor of and against terraforming, but between the populations of Earth and Mars. The sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, follow the consequences of that rift across the better part of two centuries. Absolutely fantastic, a classic, highly recommend.

No list of this sort would be complete without the inclusion of Stanislaw Lem, whose works I pilfered from my dad's sci-fi collection long before I was old enough to understand most of what was going on in them. Lots of folks have heard of Solaris via the Soderbergh film starring George Clooney (or, if you're a cinephile like me, the Tarkovsky film from the 70s). If you're going to read it, I suggest you look for the Bill Johnston translation, because it's the first translation directly from Polish to English, instead of Polish to French to English. I particularly like The Invincible and Golem XIV, which is found in the compilation Imaginary Magnitude.

Other highlights from the stole-it-from-my-dad collection are James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker, which is about self-reproducing robots on Titan and the weird angels of barely-contained heat and flame (read: humans in spacesuits) who visit them; and Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War in which a single soldier experiences an entire thousand-year interstellar war due to time dilation and falls more and more out of step with the civilization he's fighting on behalf of.

Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy series, The Litany of Earth, Winter Tide, and Deep Roots, resonates pretty deeply with me; they're basically a story of isolation within a prejudiced society and living with the legacy of genocide via reclaiming Deep Ones as sympathetic protagonists. Highly recommend if that's at all your jam. Also, A Half-Built Garden is, I think, a strong rec for anyone who likes HDG at all; it's literally about an alien civilization showing up to a post-climate-collapse Earth and saying "We're here to rescue you."

Olaf Stapledon is an author who sadly doesn't get enough attention these days. We're coming up on a century since the publication of Last and First Men, which is a future history of the next two billion years of human evolution and which was my introduction to his work. I will say, because of when he was writing, not only is some of the science in his sci-fi a little off, but you do have to step lightly with Stapledon's work; he's not a Lovecraft by any measure, but he was writing with the language of his time, and every so often you'll run into something that makes you go "UH." But that's true of a lot of golden age sci-fi, to be perfectly honest, and I think Stapledon's one of the best of that lot.

Ursula K. LeGuin. Just absolutely anything by Ursula K. LeGuin, fiction, nonfiction, whatever. Immense talent and skill, supremely influential, and the clarity of thought she brought to the craft of writing is invaluable for anyone who wants to learn it. I have not read enough LeGuin and I feel deep shame for it and am slowly working to remedy that. The Left Hand of Darkness (another book swiped from my dad's collection) is probably my favorite thus far.

This is getting absurdly long so I think I'm going to just resort to quick recs from here.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice and its sequels. A dead starship's last surviving component and her revenge quest on behalf of a particularly beloved Lieutenant? Very Kana-coded.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Hivemind wolves whose shared consciousness runs on sound. How cool is that?

Astro Teller's Exegesis. An epistolary told in emails between a computer scientist and the AI she accidentally turned loose on the late-90s internet. So few people have read this, and that's criminal.

Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle For Leibowitz. If you have not read this, change that. Not optional.

To be honest, I could keep doing this for a while, there are a lot of authors whose work I absolutely adore, but I think this is more than enough to sate most folks' reading appetite for quite a while. I hope this starts a very enjoyable and enlightening journey for all y'all. My advice is not to limit yourselves to what I've written here, but to let it inspire you to keep going beyond it. There's always something new to read, and if you want to become a better writer, there's two things you have to do: write like there's no tomorrow, and read like you're drinking the ocean.

And even if you aren't trying to improve your writing craft, reading is good for you. Literacy is one of the most powerful technologies humans have ever invented, and it underlies not only so much of the technology we have but the societies we have. The ability to write down your thoughts and have them persist until someone else comes along and accepts those thoughts into their own mind is nothing short of magic, and it sadly goes unappreciated by many. Read. Train your mind to interrogate the text, to interrogate the world around, to understand the world around you. The horizon, here representing the growth of you as a reader, is not a destination but merely a step along the way, because the more you read, the more you will find to read.

Find more horizons, and leave them in your wake.

[foone]

the annoying thing about the privacy nightmare that is age verification is that this is 100% doable with double-anonymity: The verifier doesn't know what site/app you're verifying your age on, and the site/app doesn't need to know your personal information.

The fun part is that you could do this extremely easily by just bundling a key with an item you can't buy unless you're 18. Like a beer that includes a PGP key, or a pornographic magazine with a page that's a randomly generated key.

The site/app doesn't need to know WHO you are, only that you have access to something you can only get by being 18. This way they're putting the burden of verifying your age onto someone else, someone else who is already legally required to do exactly that.

But no one is interested in developing this because the point of age verification has never been age verification. it's always been governments trying to tie a real-world ID to internet identities, and companies trying to get more private information on users so they can sell it to advertisers.

(and also, it's not like this would be a good system even if it'd work and do what it says it'd do: We shouldn't be blocking minors off of large parts of the internet just for the sin of being underage, especially when "mature" labeling gets applied to more than just pornography. Queer teens shouldn't be separated from their support groups by parents who don't think they're mature enough to learn about that, for example)

[salamanding]

debate on the matter of ownership

[capsyst]

I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?

Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.

Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).

But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?

The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:

They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣

That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.

That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.

[un-monstre]

In hindsight being a “gifted kid” is so funny. You have substantial difficulties with socializing and fine motor skills but we’re going to ignore that because you’re really good at reading chapter books

[foone]

We don't need to raise this one because it can read novels.

[inwardhardar]

[mangonetics]

Transition holds the same role in crossdressing manga that Marxism holds in all cyberpunk media

[goldengamer2500]